The prison gate looked familiar. I’ve never been to San Quentin, but as I watched Christine Yoo, director of the new documentary 26.2 to Life cross the first threshold into the California prison facility on a recent PBS News Hour interview, I remembered.
I still have the postcard.
The photograph on the front features a strangely unimposing, ivy-covered main gate to San Quentin Prison (S.Q.), open to the long, paved entrance road bordered by chain link fences. Not a soul in sight under a cloudless California blue sky. Down the road is a guard tower and further in the background is a glimpse of the sprawling multi-story, multi-building prison complex atop a steep cliff.
I had received the card, addressed to my campus P.O. Box, in October 1978 when I was a junior in college. I was accustomed to getting mail from prison—but not the notorious S.Q. The man with whom I exchanged letters, post-marked San Luis Obispo, came from my pen-pal, Greg, who was serving time just up the coast from me inside the California Men’s Colony, a place I never visited and knew little about. We’d met on paper through a fellow prisoner named James to whom my college roommate had been writing. Paid subscribers can read about the unlikely genesis of those relationships in an archived In Our Own Ink post, Prison Pen Pal B53728.
“Got a bunch of these ‘Hollywood Screen Set’ picture postcards of the dismal dungeon S.Q.—screen sets are all painted up out front where people see, but backstage is the ugly truth. The only beauty of this place is the miracle of spiritual endurance of the men confined within these walls, that in spite of S.Q., many remain human hearts,” Greg wrote in tiny but legible script.
The 10-cent postage stamp pictures the stately, round-domed Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., above which are the words, “We hold these Truths…”
The self-evident truth of this postcard, however, was Greg’s transfer to San Quentin in Tamal, California, a place unlike any he’d experienced so far during his years in and out of the prison system. With each year, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness slipped further away.
Before the postcard, the last typed letter I’d received from San Luis Obispo was addressed to me c/o The Dormez Vous Lodge in Aspen, Colorado, where I spent a summer living in a cozy communal setting with other college students while working as a maid for a tourist resort. He was writing to say he hadn’t heard from me for weeks. “Dearest Andi: Have I failed you in some way?”
Where earlier letters had narrated upbeat accounts of his close friends on the outside and his classes, hobbies, and buddies on the inside, that letter started off differently. Everything “has been going downhill” lately. He was either “on the wrong side of God,” he says, or his bad deeds are all catching up to him.
“I don’t reckon I will give up though and maybe that is because there is always some hope. You can lock a man up, have him come down sick, take your love from him, but he can always hope and he can pray and he can keep on pushing for a brighter tomorrow.”
No, I didn’t know the extent of his crimes, only that he’d been in trouble on and off for years after serving in the Army in Viet Nam. I assumed that his being in a “minimum security” facility meant some sort of non-violent offense. After all, my step-dad, who was My First Prison Pen-Pal, had also served a short sentence for a white-collar crime in Chino, another California Men’s Colony. I was wrong.
Greg wrote expressively about the mountains and the freedom that he imagines I’m surrounded by in Aspen, “looking down on some little stream that chuckles over the rocks, shaded by trees, chilled by winds walking down off the snow-capped peaks.” He longs to be “where the mountain meets the sky with great battlements of clouds gathering all around.” [I’m struck now by his use of the word “battlements,” for an earlier section of his letter recited a history lesson about Abraham Lincoln. I suspect he’d been reading a Lincoln biography.]
His reality was much darker: “They sewed my mouth back up after a prison gang rat-packed me on the tier the other day.” It’s a prison story—a disagreement over one guy shooting off his mouth with derogatory remarks about women during a television program, other guys getting agitated, Greg having enough and switching the channel, and the first guy coming unglued before leaving the t.v. room. Hours later, Greg is attacked, injured (“half my lip torn off”), and sent to another quad, nowhere near his friend James. “They may ship me to another institution,” he told me, “and ruin my set-up here for college and hobby craft.”
One of Greg’s hobbies was making what he called “kochina” dolls—small figurines he crafted from slab-saw cut pieces of turquoise, carnelian, coral, and mother-of-pearl held together with epoxy and hung on a sterling silver chain. The jewelry hobby kept him busy and put a little cash in his pocket—what little he made from items sold in the prison gift store.
The letter closed with a hopeful “Love & Peace & Sunshine” above Greg’s handwritten signature, and at the time, I’m sure I didn’t think much about his concern over being shipped to another institution.
Only later did I learn that the San Luis Obispo facility was both minimum and medium security (with maximum security possible, as needed). Despite its coastal location and variety of educational, vocational, and treatment opportunities, the Men’s Colony housed violent, career criminals. Lawrence Bittaker, doing time for attempted murder, met Roy Norris, a convicted rapist. Before Bittaker’s release, he and Norris hatched a plan to rape and murder teenage girls. Around the time Greg was being transferred to San Quentin, Bittaker was released from the Men’s Colony. Several months later, after Norris got out, the two executed their plan five times over in 1979. With 3,000 inmates located in separate buildings on hundreds of acres, it’s doubtful, though not impossible, that Greg ever met the duo (but if you’re so inclined, you can look them up on Wikipedia).
In the weeks following the postcard from San Quentin came long, handwritten letters sometimes tucked inside a greeting card pre-printed with a Bible verse. He no longer had access to a typewriter. In one letter, he gave an account of being in solitary confinement at S.Q. and teased me about my passion for reading Tolkien (“books can be Hobbit forming”). By July 1979, Greg had been transferred to yet another facility, this time, I gathered, for mental health issues. We continued to exchange letters, although as I entered my senior year of college, mine were less frequent and his were increasingly troubling and less coherent, but I’ve saved them all.
So many stories yet to tell.
Kudos to Christine Yoo and her team for producing their documentary film, 26.2 to Life, about the San Quentin 1000 Mile Club and the men inside San Quentin who train for and run a prison-yard marathon. I like to think that Greg would have been a member of that club, had it existed in the 1980s, and that he may have had a team cheering for him.
Who’s on your team? What life-marathon are you running?
Hello Andi, At last! Tonight when I tried to become a Substack member the zip code glitch I experienced many times previously was fixed. I'm a member! I'm behind in replying to your recent posts. I easily relate to the experience of investing time and money to attend a book marketing event; meeting new people and having an interesting day, but sales are minimal. Been there! // Thank you for sharing about Greg and San Quentin in your newest post. I find many common threads, not exactly the same, but similar to my own experiences in writing to inmates. // Over a period of many years I wrote to several. My first letter to a prisoner was in August 1975. That letter eventually connected me to Garry, my longest correspondent, from September 1981 until his death in March 2021. Our correspondence was minimal near the end of his life, and letters had turned to email, but I kept in touch as he drifted away. That's the prisoner I wrote about in my book, "After the Murder."// I know of the prison gift shop. I know of doing time "in the hole," solitary. I know about strip searches, Department of Corrections forms, and long lines waiting to visit. I know dreams of a future that held us together. // OKAY, it's late here. But I'm happy to be a member along with your other writing fans.// BTW, I'm enrolled in "Dramatic Theory and Criticism" this semester. It's complicated, interesting and there's so much to learn. I look forward to your next post. (heart emoji)
What happened to Greg?